Link baiting boosts the link popularity of a web site and has quickly become a very effective method of promoting web sites, by increasing their traffic and raising their search engine rankings. Due to the viral aspects of link baiting, inbound links increase very quickly without much additional input after it has been setup. Despite the fact that some consider it to be a black hat technique, link baiting is very popular these days and many top SEO experts recommend it highly.

What is link baiting? It is simply a means of creating content that spreads like a virus on the internet. No, this isn’t the kind of virus that infects your computer. Rather, viral content writing involves material that is made freely available online such as tools, useful software, articles, news, gossip, humor, or controversy. The goal of this original content is to attract the interest of other web publishers or peers in the industry, who in return, will add links to their web pages because they like or consider the posted material to be interesting, original, or useful for their site visitors. The materials used in link baiting can provide a valuable information resource to their readers and visitors or it may be just rumor or gossip posted on the web site for the sole purpose of “hooking” as many links as possible.

This technique doesn’t involve requesting any links actively from other webmasters. Webmasters voluntarily link to your website. This is a safer technique when compared to reciprocal linking or purchasing off-topic links which can get a site owner in trouble. It represents the true value and meaning of the Internet.

The first thing everyone needs if they are going to ‘bait’ a link is of course a good ‘hook’. As mentioned before, there are various types of hooks, such as tools, software, news, attacks, humor, rumors, controversy, articles, stories and essays. There are “nice” hooks and “nasty” hooks. SEO experts do not recommend the nasty hooks, as they may lead to unexpected consequences (such as litigation).

In order to prepare the bait with the highest probability of success, you have to know the current trends, latest news and any rumors on the web. Find the hottest, most intriguing topics or fill a void of a sufficiently large market that needs to be addressed.

After you decide on a theme and write the material, you must promote it. It’s easy to promote something if you are a well-known author or blogger. In case you aren’t, try to contact a professional and ask for his help. Never ask for a link because most people get annoyed by that. If the material being promoted has good content, it will most likely be noticed, read and linked automatically without having to “beg” anyone to link to your site. Something that “catches the eye” will spread all over the Internet like wildfire and attract lots of quality visitors to your website.

Link baiting has been revived somewhat lately due to the increase in popularity of blogs and RSS which provide people with an easy method of posting their material online.

The main disadvantage of utilizing link-bait methods is that they are usually time consuming and can be quite difficult to develop. In order to write interesting and original material for link baiting, a great deal of investment in time and effort on research and brainstorming are needed.

At first sight link baiting may seem like it’s not worth the effort because of the time and effort involved. Well-orchestrated link baiting, however enables any webmaster to generate a ton of free links from well-known sites and even top industry authority sites that would otherwise be expensive or otherwise impossible to obtain. It can save thousands of dollars in advertising costs to obtain these links and can potentially generate a lot of sales by attracting high quality traffic to your web site especially if your materials have good content. With many top SEO experts recommending it, this phenomenon has grown into a more mainstream marketing vehicle for webmasters.